A Really, Really Big Frankenstein's Monster

 

cover art by Margaret Brundage

Recently, I posted the above image (concept art by stop-motion pioneer Willis O'Brien) on Facebook. It's about a proposed sequel to the original King Kong. In this story, Kong would have survived the fall from the Empire State Building and eventually get into a fight with a giant monster made by Dr. Frankenstein's grandson.  I like Son of Kong and I'm not convinced that having Kong survive wouldn't irreparably hurt the emotional impact of the original film's ending. But, all the same, it's too bad we never got to see this story brought to live by O'Brien's genius.

Anyway, someone mentioned that this reminded him of the Clark Ashton Smith story "The Colossus of Ylourgne," originally published in the June 1934 issue of Weird Tales. 

This one is set in the make-believe medieval province of Averoigne, the setting for about a dozen of Smith's tale. A evil sorcerer named Nathaire has vanished from the city of Vyones. Soon after, dead men start digging their way out of graves or walking out of their own funerals, all traveling to the same creepy castle (known as Ylourgne). A former disciple of Nathaire, named Gerard, investigates.

Gerard discovers that Nathaire is using the corpses to build a colossus--a giant constructed from the bones and flesh of the dead men. Nathaire is dying, so he intends to transfer his soul into the colossus and rampage across Averoigne, destroying the city of Vyones and taking revenge upon them for former persecutions. 

Gerard ends up a prisoner in a pitch-dark dungeon, but manages to escape. By now the colossus is going full-on Kaiju against the province, but Gerard--with his own magical knowledge--thinks he might be able to stop it.

It's a great story--hitting an appropriately creepy vibe from start to finish, enlivined by Smith's great prose and his obvious enjoyment of dropping in obscure words. (Seriously, don't read a Smith story without a dictionary handy.)

Clark Ashton Smith must have been  influenced by Frankenstein when he wrote this one. Such is the influence of Mary Shelley that it's impossible to do a story about reanimating the dead without thinking about her novel. But Smith takes the idea in a different direction. It's interesting that Willis O'Brien was thinking about a similar take on the Frankenstein story just a year or so before "The Colossus of Ylourgne." I don't think O'Brien's idea was known to the public (though perhaps it was mentioned in a movie magazine at the time), so Clark was almost certainly thinking up a giant Frankenstein's monster independently. Great minds think alike, I guess.

A comment on my original Facebook post suggested a movie version of "Colossus" made in the 1930s could have starred Ernest Thesiger as Nathaire and Colin Clive as Gerard. I can see Thesiger as the main bad guy with no problem. I don't know if Clive is right for Gerard, who has a few action hero moments throughout the story that doesn't give me a Clive vibe. I think that a young Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. would have been good in the part. With O'Brien animating the Colossus as it rampages acrosss medieval France, this would have been an awesome movie.